| Description |
This study examines the disparity between a modern moral sensibility, and the world-view often ascribed to the ancient Greeks in modern scholarship, specifically with references to issues surrounding cruelty and brutality. This disparity is especially pronounced with respect to the Iliad. Scholars writing on the moral sphere of the epic tend to consider the slight suffered by Achilleus, and his consequent rebellion and withdrawal of support from his fellow Greeks, as the moral crux of the epic, seldom noticing that the offense Achilleus suffers hardly compares to the harm suffered by his victims. This inequity between harm suffered and harm inflicted runs like a moral fault through the work. The arc of the story follows Achilleus' own wrestling with the fundamental flaws of his society, whose moral system has failed him. This moral system is profoundly called into question for the hero over the course of the plot; his most heroic moment is arguably that in which he transcends the dominant ethic of his own society. In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates' arguments for the virtues of justice and self-restraint against unscrupulousness and unrestrained hedonism have been found unconvincing by many modern scholars. The "standard account" in scholarship on the Gorgias is that Socrates' arguments are a failure. While it may be true that not all of Socrates' logical arguments "hold water," his extralogical means of persuasion, especially myth and metaphor, have been widely underappreciated by scholars. In the interpretation offered here, the Gorgias can be regarded as an enactment of Plato's famous Allegory of the iv Cave, in which the philosopher can only offer glimpses of truth to his cave-dwelling listeners by indirect means, and try to lead them in the direction of discovering for themselves truths that must be lived to be known. Since the "rediscovery" of Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women in the early twentieth century, aspects of this play have also been generally missed in modern scholarship, apparently on account of underlying assumptions about ancient Greek culture. The brutal cruelty of the Greek chieftains in the play is not portrayed in a "heroic" light. Euripides' Athenian audience would have found the circumstances of the play uncannily familiar, for they had acted with similar brutality toward the inhabitants of the island of Melos in the previous year. Analogous to the Greeks in the play, whose arrogant hubris blinds them to themselves and sets them up for the fall that awaits them, the Athenians themselves are in a sense tragic figures of the play they watch. The readings of these works offered here attempt to narrow the gap usually assumed to separate the moral perspectives of these works from our own. I hope that the power of these works to hold a mirror up to ourselves and our own society is consequently increased. |
